Even physical services are impacted by technology like autonomous delivery bots. It was just a matter of time until someone used those as ad platforms. That day has come, with news that Wrapify, which puts ads on vehicles (and applies location tracking to target them effectively), has partnered with autonomous delivery service Kiwibot. You can see it now in San Jose and soon in Denver and Los Angeles.
It’s easy to think of Cisco as an infrastructure company but their products also include Webex and contact center systems, so they are definitely in the customer experience and collaboration industries too. Reinforcing the point: they just paid $730 million for IMImobile, which offers a cross-channel customer interaction management suite. In other words, they live closer to Salesforce, Pega, and Twilio than you might have realized.
What’s that, you thought identity data was the new oil? That means cookie replacements are like wind power. The latest blast of hot air comes from Verizon Media, in the form of a unified solution called ConnectID. It can serve ads based on 900 million consumer relationships across 30+ Verizon Media brands including Yahoo!, HuffPost, AOL, and TechCrunch. It’s a closed universe, but a big one.
Disney has agreed to license more than 200 characters, costumes, and environments (but not voices or talent likenesses) to OpenAI for Sora, its gen AI video platform. This is highly unusual for Disney, which generally sues AI models for copyright infringement; in fact, it sued Google for that a day before announcing the OpenAI deal. Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI, nicely illustrating how very eager they are to join the AI party.